Brooklyn’s Colson Whitehead, author of “The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death,” is one of the borough’s finest authors. And that’s saying a lot.

Brooklyn is crowded with so many fine novelists that it’s hard to pick just one to deem irresistible. That said, Colson Whitehead is definitely a contender for the title of Brooklyn’s finest.

Since the borough has replaced Manhattan as the epicenter of vibrant fiction, that’s saying a lot.

In his newest book, “The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death,” the novelist takes something of a busman’s holiday. It’s a nonfiction escapade in which Whitehead heads to Las Vegas, after first upping his game in Atlantic City, to futz around at the World Series of Poker.

Here’s how a fiction writer with a wry sensibility trains for a premier poker tournament. First he finds a poker coach with suitable literary credentials, Helen Ellis (“The Turning”), who has actually played in the WSOP. Then he hires a fitness trainer whose specialty is core strengthening.

“The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death,” by Colson Whitehead

“I have to become a Living Poker Weapon,” he tells the latter.

Grantland magazine staked him the $10,000 entry fee in lieu of payment for a piece about a middle-aged man who “decides to take on the stress of being one of the most unqualified players in the history of the Big Game.”

The Main Event, the culminating contest of the WSOP, is the most prestigious tournament in all of poker. In 2011, the year Whitehead threw down his cards, there were 6,865 entrants. The winner is considered to be the world champion of poker.

“The Bees” by Laline Paull

Whitehead’s poker chops were limited to $5 buy-in games, but the quality his play depended on whether he was too busy catching up with friends to pay attention to his cards. Still, he boasts of one clear advantage at the table.

“I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside.”

Whitehead, who refers to his last novel about a zombie takeover of lower Manhattan (“Zone One”) as an autobiography, takes his fatalistic self to Vegas to play his first casino tournament ever.

“The Son” by Jo Nesbo

The same no-limit, hold ’em championship was famously won by an amateur, the aptly named Chris Moneymaker, in 2003. But while Whitehead is there to play, he’s mostly in Vegas to closely observe what life is like when everything for everyone hangs on the turn of a card.

“The Noble Hustle” is fierce, funny and totally worth the buy-in.

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“The Snow Queen” by Michael Cunningham

“The Bees” by Laline Paull
A dystopian novel that is catching some buzz. Flora 717 is bred to serve the hive as a sanitation worker but she demonstrates an unprecedented facility, at least among worker bees, for thinking and reasoning that causes her to rise through the rigid hierarchy to serve the Queen. Flora 717 may have access to the Hive Mind but she also has a secret that would upset far more than the social order. Her “variance,” or some would say “mutation,” threatens the future of all.

“The Son”by Jo Nesbo
A stand-alone novel from the author of the hugely popular Harry Hole series. Sonny Lofthus, a drug addict, confessed to murders ostensibly committed by his father, a police officer who killed himself. In prison he learns that his father was actually murdered and sets out to violently eliminate the men responsible. That brings him up against a notorious gangster who includes human trafficking, money laundering and drugs on his résumé. Violent and twisty, there’s even a love element thrown in as Lofthus falls for the director of his rehab facility.

“The Snow Queen”by Michael Cunningham
The seventh novel by the author of “The Hours.” It’s 2004 and in a Bushwick apartment, three people struggle with their futures. Tyler, a musician, hides his cocaine addiction but believes the drug is the key to his creativity. His girlfriend, Beth, is fighting an aggressive cancer. Meanwhile, brother Barrett, middle-aged and lost in life, comes home one night reporting having seen a spectral light in Central Park that has awakened his religious curiosity. A spirituality-infused tale of an ad hoc family.